“Do you suppose you can carry a mount in a magic bag?” I wonder as I pull Jingles out of my bag to ride on my shoulder while we travel.
We’re leaving Arenthia and heading for the half-crumbled bridge over the river that everyone seems to be absolutely confident in not crumbling further when they try to cross it. I’d hope someone will eventually get out here and actually fix it.
“I think that might be a bit much,” Eran says. “A little monkey is one thing but I don’t think I really want to be pulling a horse out of my ass.”
“What if it’s like a Dwemer spider or something?” I ask.
“A living mount would probably be smart enough not to go running off a cliff at full speed,” Eran puts in. “A mechanical one… might not.”
“It would be quite the inconspicuous sight, five people dressed like adventurers riding Dwemer contraptions,” Merry adds. “Pardon me. Five people and a monkey.”
“Monkeys are people too,” I say. “The monkey can get a sidecar.”
Partway across the bridge, we come upon a black-furred Khajiit woman who introduces herself (or speaks in the third person as) Zadala. She’s one of the Eyes of the Queen and is late for a meeting with Cariel but lost some important medicinal herbs and intelligence documents in the river.
“Those seem like things that should not be dropped in rivers, no?” Ilara comments.
“They were in sealed containers,” Zadala says. “Hopefully they’re still intact.”
Naturally, we agree to go mucking around in the muck while Zadala gets to her important meeting about whatever. We split up and search the river banks (and kill trolls because there are trolls here).
“Ugh,” Eran mumbles. “We’re doing a task that requires nothing more than eyes and hands, and the monkey is winning.”
Jingles ooks and proudly holds aloft another bundle of medicinal herbs. Then tears it open and starts chewing on them.
“No, Jingles!” I say. “These are medicinal herbs. They’re needed by people for medicinal purposes.” I pause. “Who did she say needed them again?”
“The Arenthian resistance,” Eran reminds me. “Although since they’re not really needing to resist anything anymore, they’re probably just the Arenthian people again now.”
We find no sign of a scroll case, but a helpful fisher woman informs us that her brother found it and since it looked valuable, he went to fence it down at the Thizzrini Arena.
“Ooooh, there’s an arena?” I say.
We swing back to Arenthia to drop off the herbs and head south along the main road.
A book titled Song of the Askelde Men (Summary: Nord poetry) is laying on the ground underneath a skeleton hung from a tree by the ankles, next to a small pile of pumpkins.
Eran beholds the scene and comments, “There’s a story here. Not a story I want to know, but a story nonetheless.”
The road brings us to another set of Imperial walls. A town named Greenhill, according to a helpful sign. Funny, though, the place isn’t built on top of a hill and neither is it especially greener than the surrounding countryside.
A Bosmer man is calling for help, right next to an armored Khajiit guard who is steadfastly ignoring him and keeping his eyes firmly fixed upon the road. Upon questioning the Bosmer, I quickly realize why he’s being ignored. The Bosmer is drunk and barely coherent, and babbles something about people who might be evil, carrying things around.
“Well,” I say. “Don’t you worry, my good mer. We’ll look into it and make sure there’s nothing evil going on around here. Now why don’t you go sleep that off before you fall over.”
We head into town. The buildings are mostly Imperial-style, with some Khajiit merchant tents set up off to one side, but the Bosmer have made the buildings their own with hanging hides and bones. The big building that was once a temple of the Divines now has a large tree growing inside of it and some of the stained class windows are broken. There’s a Skyshard behind it, which I absorb.
The drunk mer had directed us (more or less) toward one specific house that might or might not be involved in evil things somehow. Outside, we run into a nervous Khajiit (Ezreba, as she says her name in the third person) who was totally just leaving after doing nothing of importance.
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Inside and up the stairs, I’m quick to determine that there is, indeed, something evil going on here upon seeing a glowing red crystal with a shadowy mathra hovering over it and a tormented Bosmer begging us to destroy the crystal. I go up and smash it, and the mathra disappears along with the red glow.
The drunk man is outside, and quite surprised to find out that the “evil” going on here was cultists and mind control crystals, because he apparently thought they were jewel smugglers. Which, admittedly, the guards also should have been looking into, but I feel like the main purpose of guards is to violently persecute sweetroll thieves. Not that I would know. I’ve never been caught stealing sweetrolls.
We make our way through town, going from house to house and smashing crystals. The drunk’s wife is missing, the suspicious Khajiit is being suspicious, and hopefully this is a problem that can be solved simply through breaking things and killing some cultists. No need to make things overly complicated.
The drunk’s kidnapped wife turns out to be the town’s treethane, not that he was coherent enough to mention that part. She points us to the temple catacombs, where I quickly head off looking for cultists and mathra to hit. I’m not disappointed.
As it turns out, the suspicious Khajiit’s mate was kidnapped and the Stonefire Cult used him as a hostage to coerce her into betraying the town. And then killed him anyway. The cultists haphazardly threw a pile of Khajiit corpses into a room in the back of the catacombs and left them there to rot. Malacath’s balls, at least the Worm Cult did something with the corpses they made. These Stonefire guys just seem like they want to make a mess instead. And if what I’ve seen so far is any indication, they’re probably making a mess all over Reaper’s March.
We emerge from the catacombs to find the treethane in the middle of town along with her drunk husband, who is drinking from a mug in his hand that he had acquired in the meantime. Everyone is being no longer possessed or mind controlled or whatever, but now there’s the small problem of what to do about Ezreba.
And they’re asking me what to do with her, whether to exile her or forgive her or whatever, and I have no idea why. The treethane wants me to talk to everyone in town and get their opinions first, but I don’t. I’ve found that when you ask someone for their opinion and then go against it, they tend to be more upset about it than had their input not been asked for in the first place. And in any case, justice isn’t a democracy.
I sympathize with the poor Khajiit woman who just lost her husband. I’m not sure what I would do if someone tried to use Roku and Grishka as hostages against me, but I can only imagine that it would end in quite a lot of blood and fire. Not everyone is capable of such concentrated violence as me, but I can’t imagine that it would take a genius to realize the cultists couldn’t be trusted. She was afraid and made a very poor call, and now is not the time to lecture anyone on how if cultists are holding anyone hostage, it’s probably best to consider them dead already and apply violence to the situation. I mean, they’re cultists. Rescue if possible, revenge if not, and at no point do you deliberately get your neighbors possessed by evil spirits.
“She can’t stay,” I say. “No one here is ever going to be able to fully trust her again. But don’t just cut her loose. Send her to the temple in Rawl’kha for penance. I’ll even offer to escort her so that she doesn’t get lost along the way.”
Unspoken is the thought that simply cutting her loose and pushing her out of society is liable to push her right back into the hands of one cult or another. She’s demonstrated weakness once, and now she has nothing left to lose. I’d rather not have to behead her later when she starts summoning Daedra and sacrificing her former neighbors. (Why is the word “be-head” and not “de-head”, anyway?)
Ezreba goes to pack, and my friends and I rest and explore town a bit in the meantime now that people aren’t looking at us with creepy glowy eyes and being angry about having customers.
I decide to take a moment to poke into random buildings while I’m at it. Possibly to find things to steal or whatever. People don’t generally get annoyed about you walking into unlocked buildings, after all. One house by the farm contains the odd sight of a Bosmer tent inside of a Khajiit-style house. A book titled Dwemer Inquiries Volume 1 lays on a cushion and there’s no one here to tell me I can’t borrow it indefinitely. Eran and Merry exchange “eh he’s just stealing books again, whatever” looks with a shrug and a sigh.
Come morning, Ezreba meets us at the east gate. “This one is ready to go. Thank you for… not executing her.”
I might have discussed beheading more loudly than I thought I had.
“Do you have everything?” I ask.
“Clothes, a few mementos,” Ezreba says with a sigh. “Dark Moons… It is just sinking in now that he is really gone. A night alone in our home and it was no longer a home without him even if I would still be welcome there.”
“Cultists always ruin everything,” I say. “Stay alert. The roads aren’t safe. Keep behind me and stay near Merry or Gelur.”
“There’s no way we’re getting to Rawl’kha without doing glorious battle with every skeever between here and there,” Merry says dryly.
We’ve no sooner returned to the road that an unearthly wail splits the air and dark chains rattle to the ground ahead of us.
“And… these,” I say, hefting an axe. “These fetchers are still at it even though we already killed their leader. Let’s go inconvenience some Daedra, my friends.”
Once we’ve returned the Daedra and their Anchor back to Oblivion, Ezreba crawls out from where she spent the battle hiding behind a large rock.
“Ezreba… did not realize things were so bad out here,” she says meekly. “She is glad she did not have to go off by herself.”
Lately, I’ve started to get the feeling that Manny actually had little to nothing to do with the Dark Anchors in the first place, despite it being Worm Cultists doing the rituals. What would this have anything to do with his actual plan of using the amulet of doom to betray Molag Bal and make himself a god somehow? No, I think stopping the Dark Anchors is going to require stopping them from the source. And I’m… apprehensive. Just apprehensive of making an excursion into Coldharbour to find the right thing to smash to stop this shit.